Discusses the appeal of Paris to Black authors

From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980

Literature & Fiction

Fabre, Michel

History & Criticism

University of Illinois Press

Explores the African American writer's literary odyssey and struggle for freedom from racism and materialism

The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright

Business & Money

Widely acclaimed for its comprehensive and sensitive picture of one of America's most renowned writers, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright received the Anisfield-Wolf Award on Race Relations when it was first published. This first paperback edition contains a new preface and bibliographic essay, updating changes in the author's approach to his subject and discussing works published on Wright since 1973.

United States

Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980; 'The list of individuals profiled in this thoughtful, eye-opening study is a veritable who's who of black America literature...By discussing the effects of both world wars and the ideologies of the Harlem Renaissance, the French Negritude movement, and Black Power in Paris, Fabre enriches our understanding of black history, culture, and art on both sides of the Atlantic.'

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

The first real reviewing of African-American literature in France began in 1844, when audiences welcomed the romantic dramas of Victor Sejour. With the passing of time, African-American works have become increasingly known in France, where they are now translated almost as soon as they come out in the United States. This bibliography charts the French critical response to African-American literature from the 19th century to 1970.
The bulk of the items selected were published between 1900 and 1970, and all were printed in French. The selection has been limited to responses to the works of creative writers, along with some important and influential autobiographical writings. Entries are arranged in chronological sections, and then alphabetically within each section. Annotations summarize the critical views expressed in the work cited. As a whole, the bibliography is a valuable guide to changing French critical attitudes toward African-American literature and is an index to the growing popularity of African-American literature in France.

The French Critical Reception of African-American Literature: From the Beginnings to 1970 An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Afro-American and African Studies)

Greenwood

A contemporary of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes wrote with perhaps more angry fire than his celebrated colleagues about black protagonists doomed by white racisim and self-hate. Among his writings is a series of hard-boiled detective novels featuring black detectives and a host of Harlem hustlers. The acclaimed Harlem series and much of his later work were written in France where Himes lived as an American expatriate from 1953 until his death in 1984. Exhaustively researched and well constructed, this comprehensive bibliography clears up mysteries and dispels misconceptions about the extent of Himes's work and its critical reception.
The primary bibliography identifies all United States, French, and British first and second editions of Himes's novels, the first appearances in periodicals of his short stories, his collected fiction, and his magazine and book-length nonfiction pieces. It includes manuscript materials and a filmography of adaptations of his novels. The annotated secondary bibliography provides a key to the biographical and critical work produced about Himes in the United States, Britain, and France since the late 1940s. Chronologically organized, it is indexed by author and by titles of the relevant Himes's works. The volume's introduction outlines Himes's life and career, discusses gaps in his writing history, and attempts to provide a more realistic picture of his critical reception in the United States based on an analysis of the secondary bibliography rather than on previous views influenced by Himes's own negative perceptions. A chronology of Himes's career is also included, and the volume's preface explains the organization of the bibliography and how to use it. This work will be of special value to university libraries offering programs in popular culture, American literature, and African American studies as well as to individual scholars and researchers in these fields and scholars and collectors interested particularly in Himes and his works.

Chester Himes: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Afro-American and African Studies)

Skinner, Robert E.

The World of Richard Wright (Center for the Study of Southern Culture)

Richard Wright, the Mississippi-born black writer, saw himself as "an outsider between two cultures," a man searching. 
In these twelve essays written over the last two decades Michel Fabre, Wright's biographer, follows Wright's search in an investigation of the novelist's life and career. Although the essays were not originally intended as a collection, their organization her underscores Wright's literary and intellectual development.
The essays range in time from a bibliographical study of Wright's first scanty personal library to his interest at the end of his life in Negritude and African writing. Other essays probe his first use of the Gothic and his subsequent first efforts at "naturalistic" fiction, in which he moved away from the ideology of the American Communist Party, to which he belonged for some ten years after 1933, to more personal modes of self-expression. Also explored within these pieces are Wright's use of the psychological approach, his interest in the link between sex and racism, and his obsessive exploration of the unconscious determinants in so-called criminal behavior. One essay examines Wright's poetry from the days when he wrote ideological poems published in New Masses and other radical magazines, to his later composition of blues, to his final mastery of the Japanese poetic form of haiku.
Included is an interview with Simone De Beauvoir, who discusses her friendship with Wright, and in an essay never before published, Fabre explores the relationship of Wright--"as much as soon of Mississippi as is William Faulkner"--not only to the South but to his illiterate sharecropper father and Wright's use of both as negative metaphors in his work. Fabre also delves into Wright's view of his past and his use of it in an ideological construction that asserts, in the best Afro-American literary tradition, the development of a Promethean will towards education and literacy.
The final essays address Wright's career and intellectual development during the last sixteen years of his life, spent as an American expatriate in Paris. A final essay focuses on Wright's turn at the end of his life to nofiction and his introduction of African readers to the complexities of the racial situation in the United States and the aims of the Civil Rights Movement then taking place in the U.S.

Biographies & Memoirs

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI

Richard Wright: Books and Writers

A bibliography of Wright’s library, which serves as a key to understanding the development, philosophies, and aesthetics of one of the greatest African American writers

A collection of interviews presents a portrait of the late American writer, offering glimpses into his development and character, as well as his concerns about racism and world events

Conversations With Richard Wright (Literary Conversations Series)

WRIGHT, Richard

Kinnamon, Keneth

Community & Culture

Univ Pr of Mississippi

Tomsson Black, political visionary, business genius, and underground revolutionary, plots to avenge injustice by instigating racial turmoil. The roots of racism extend far back into his ancestry, and persecution and suffering have affected many generations of his family. Tomsson's own misfortunes are the impetus for him to found a criminal underworld whose ultimate purpose is the overflow of white society. This novel, the history of Tomsson Black and an indictment of racism in America, ends in apocalypse. It is Chester Himes's ultimate statement about the destructive power of racism and his own personal fantasy of how the American Negro, through calculated acts of violence and martyrdom, could destroy the unequal system pervading American life. However, after reaching an ideological impasse, Himes, one of the angriest writers in the black protest movement, left this novel unfinished. After his death in Spain in 1984, a rumor persisted that he had left a final, unfinished Harlem story, in which he literally destroys both his Harlem backdrop and his heroes in a violent racial cataclysm. The manuscript, entitled Plan B, is that novel. It was edited and published in France, where it was widely hailed as an unfinished masterpiece by readers and critics alike. This new edition, appearing for the first time in the United States, includes an introduction by Michel Fabre (The Sorbonne) and Robert E. Skinner (Xavier University), who have prepared Plan B for publication.

Plan B

Himes,Chester

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Books by Fabre, Michel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Fabre, Michel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980

The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright

The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright

From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980

The French Critical Reception of African-American Literature: From the Beginnings to 1970 An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Afro-American and African Studies)

Chester Himes: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Afro-American and African Studies)

The World of Richard Wright (Center for the Study of Southern Culture)

Richard Wright: Books and Writers

Conversations With Richard Wright (Literary Conversations Series)

Plan B